My mother always said you should move through life and get to know a trusted plumber, electrician and lawyer (as the years go by, this is so true! unfortunately the last one becomes true, bummer, right?), but I am going to add an IT person as well — low voltage folks for running communication wires.
Hard wired telephone? We rarely use them but some folks rely on them so I thought it prudent to wire in this new house build. And additionally if you are a Comcast customer, your “bundle” may keep your other media costs down.
So! It was a challenge but with some great support from trueCABLE (link here ) and available on amazon.com here), I figured out how today’s phone lines connect to yesterday’s lines (normally a cat3 smaller cable designed only for dial tones). Loads of research for a non-phone gal, led me to a perfect solution.
The big take-aways:
1. cat 5+ or cat6 Ethernet cable can also serve as a phone line and is standard in new construction where you have the opportunity to run new lines.
2. The phone line is designed only to provide a dial tone from the incoming house line (two wires, older standard technology as you would see from the smaller phone connector). The old (cat3) line is a 2 wire line designed just for that. However, running a cat6 brings you loads of options to ‘future proof’.
3. You can run the cat6 Ethernet for phone only (thank you to this youtube post) and connect ONLY the blue, and blue-white wires to your RJ45 connectors (old phone lines for the above mentioned cat3 lines are generally RJ11 connectors — don’t put those in a new house, it is old technology). That leaves you with extra wires (non-essential), with newer cable technology.
The only purpose of these two wires is to conduct a low voltage dial tone.
4. If, some time from now you want to convert that (perhaps semi-useless) phone wire into a true Ethernet connection, the remaining wires are there to connect to a RJ45 connector. I have yet need for Ethernet phones vs. my (old) VRtech bluetooth wireless 3 phone system that uses the RJ11 jack…more on that to come I am sure.
In summary:
1. Run cat6 Ethernet where you want phone lines and connect only the blue and combined blue/white connectors to an RJ45 connector
2. Run them ‘home run’ to be safe (in other words, point A to point B — in my case I’m running directly to my Comcast cable modem in a media cabinet). For every ‘phone/Ethernet’ cable I am running directly to my low voltage patch panel. I am also doing this for my true Ethernet connections hardwired to each room.
3. Essentially it works like this for cat6: wall port —>patch panel –> connected router/phone. Let Comcast or your provider terminate (connect) the connections. The patch panel gives you multiple Ethernet connections and you can create a hub there to get all your media connections in one place.
All this to avoid post-drywall hacks for a new construction where fishing wire will lead to, well, we’ve all been there; multiple holes with a wired mess. And, given the likely complexity of your new build you will also find that beams run both north and south, and west and east making it an expensive prospect to upgrade down the line.
Any comments? I would love to hear them!
